'Lawrence of Arabia's saddlebag' goes on display for first time

Among all the treasures in the vaults of the Bank of England,
a spectacularly battered, zinc-lined leather case, soon to go on public
display for the first time, has been carefully preserved for almost a
century.

The tattered label sheds no light on its original
contents, but identifies it as the property of one Captain Blair Imrie. A
1936 ledger, cataloguing some of the more eccentric objects in the
bank's stores, describes it – not much more helpfully – as a "camel pack
for carrying gold over deserts". But Threadneedle Street legend, passed
on among generations of bank workers, insists the scruffy box has a
surprisingly glamorous history, having been lent by the bank in the first world war
to Lawrence of Arabia, when it was filled with gold supplied by the
government to reward the desert Arabs he was recruiting to rise against
the Ottoman Empire.

The box will go on display when the Bank of England Museum reopens
to the public on Monday 31 March. Jennifer Adam, the curator, has also
found some correspondence in the archives which hints at a closer
relationship between the bank and Lawrence than anyone had suspected.
Although there is no direct reference to the saddlebag, she believes the
letters do suggest that the story that the box belonged to Lawrence
could well be true, and explain why such a scruffy and ostensibly
worthless object was kept so carefully....